Most St. Louis County provisional ballots tossed out, but McCaskill’s edge still increases
The St. Louis County Election Board completed its counting of the Nov. 7 ballots, and sent in its final tallies by Tuesday’s deadline to the secretary of state’s office.
According to numbers emailed to Political Fix, the county’s final totals for the U.S. Senate race are:
Democrat Claire McCaskill, now the senator-elect — 229,264
Republican incumbent Jim Talent – 178,720
Libertarian Frank Gilmour – 4,747
Progessive Party’s Lydia Lewis – 2,412
Those numbers increase McCaskill’s county edge to 50,544 from earlier, incomplete reports — and likely will increase her statewide edge slightly as well.
County Republican elections director Joseph Goeke said the county’s final figures won’t be on the county’s Web site until next Monday; it likely will take at least that long for those numbers to be reflected in the final statewide totals.
The final county numbers reflect the addition of 1,995 provisional votes that were deemed valid, out of 4,219 cast on Nov. 7. Goeke said he didn’t have information on the chief reasons why more than 2,200 provisional ballots were tossed out. The workers involved in the verification were unavailable Wednesday.
Goeke also noted that the Nov. 7 election set a county record for the number of absentee votes cast in a non-presidential election: 24,678. That compared to 16,400 cast in 2002, he said.
Another interesting note: A slightly majority of the county’s Nov. 7 voters cast ballots on touch-screens; Goeke had expected a majority of the voters to use the optical-scan system, which involves paper ballots.
It’s unclear if that preference for the touch-screens contributed to the longer lines at some polling places, since there were generally no more than four touch-screen machines at each polling place.
According to Goeke, 196,950 voted on touch-screens and 195,474 used optical-scan.
The breakdown could be skewed a bit, by the fact that all of the absentee votes cast in the Election Board’s headquarters were on touch-screen machines.
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“The breakdown could be skewed a bit, by the fact that all of the absentee votes cast in the Election Board’s headquarters were on touch-screen machines.”
And wouldn’t all of the absentee ballots cast by mail have been paper? (I didn’t see any letter carriers toting touch screens!) Aren’t more absentee ballots cast by mail than in person?